Strategic Pragmatic Underspecification in News Headlines

초록

This study examines the strategic restriction of information in contemporary news headlines by identifying violations of Grice’s Maxim of Quantity. A corpus of 300 headlines was sampled across six domains: business, health, technology, politics, entertainment, and crime. The analysis employed a mixed methods design. Quantitative analysis in SPSS measured the frequency of linguistic strategies and confirmed strong interrater reliability. Qualitative content analysis explored the discursive and ideological functions of these strategies. The research addresses two central questions: (1) Which strategies are most commonly employed to withhold information in headlines? (2) How do these strategies violate the Maxim of Quantity by limiting explicit detail? The analysis utilized five categories of underspecification: vagueness, ellipsis and omission, sensationalism, questions(interrogatives), and presuppositions. Findings indicate that presuppositions and sensationalism are prevalent, particularly in politics and crime, while vagueness is the least frequent. These patterns demonstrate that pragmatic violations reflect systematic practices that enhance salience, obscure agency, and shape interpretation. The study contributes to pragmatic theory, advances discourse analysis of journalistic language, and highlights the ethical importance of critical media literacy in resisting manipulative headline strategies.

키워드